Views from the Store

I have gone past my 3 months at the Apprentice Store and it’d been great so far but the workload was about to increase. Number 1 on the list was daily server checks for a client while they were on holiday, I really was clueless about this but looking forward to learning.

Thankfully I wasn’t thrown in the deep end and David spend time with me showing me the ins and outs of everything I needed to do. The process was to check Windows Event Logs which for those who don’t know log information outputted by the operating system and applications, including errors, this is what I was looking for. In addition to that, I had to check some specific pieces of software the client was running such as the anti-virus. Of course this was no use unless documented so this was put into a Excel spreadsheet and sent to the client daily.

The main event for this week was a session on Office 365 for the client that we most recently did an Office 365 migration for. I was quite heavily involved with this migration so I was looking forward to meeting all the people I had spoken with on the phone for the last couple months.

This client was based down in Edinburgh and we were heading down on the Wednesday morning, I had some time in the week before my course to prepare but David had also given me Monday and Tuesday as well. About half way through Monday, I thought I wouldn’t need to do any more. I felt I had gathered all the information they needed to know and could present it.

This week was the week of my Information Security Fundamentals course. While I had mentioned in previous blogs I was apprehensive, when it actually came to it I found I was more excited.

I arrived in Glasgow late on Sunday night and headed to the hotel. It was called “Point A”, it was very modern, you could change the colour of your lights in your room, they had USB ports on the plug sockets and a TV with on demand. The room I had didn’t have a window but it was still a nice place to stay and it’s in a really good location with Buchanan street, Sauchiehall street and more importantly the QA building very close by.

It was a bit of an unusual start to this week, it definitely felt like it at least as I was getting up at 5am! The reason for this was a trip to Orkney to attend a business meeting with David. I’d never been to Orkney before and hadn’t been on a ferry in years so the 5am start didn’t really bother me all too much, I was looking forward to it.

Due to the amount of travelling on this day it was a good chance to talk about my job performance and generally all things Apprentice Store. Although my weaknesses were pointed out I’m glad they were as I know what I need to improve on and although there was a lot of deadtime in this day, I think the discussions we had were important for my development. It’s good to take an occasional break from the typical office environment, I found that it’s benefited me more than I thought.

The bulk of the work for my second Office 365 migration had now been completed with just a few finishing touches needing to be made. My focus shifted over to preparing for a workshop at the UHI for a group of RAF cadets.

David showed Vicky and I a website which had cyber security challenges and quizzes. The plan was to base the workshop around this. I found these really tricky, even some of the easy ones! I had a lot of questions but once these were answered and I’d tried the challenges a couple times I felt I was ready for the workshop.

The migration took place this week, our client could still access both old email and new email after we changed the mail flow so there was minimal disruption but I still felt the pressure to get things working properly. I had done all the necessary preparations but you never know what sort of problems could arise.

And a problem did arise, I was uploading email data to 365 from their server but found out that their connection couldn’t handle it. After a quick google search I found I could limit the bandwidth the upload command was using, this worked but it worked slowly. It was going to take 3 days at this rate, we’d be quicker posting the data!

This week I was starting the work for my second Office 365 migration, this is for a far smaller company and we’re doing the service free of charge. This provides a great opportunity for me to take a bit more of a lead with my experience from the last migration.

I’ve learnt that IT requires a lot of planning so that was the first step, come up with a project plan. I used the one David had written for the last migration as a starting point and got to work. Now I had a rough idea of what I was doing I started to take action, using PowerShell to gather information about all the resources on our client’s server.

I mentioned that we went to meet a client in Elgin last week, they were interested in getting Vicky to do a free penetration test on their network. I assumed that the work she would do for this would just go over my head but I was glad to find something I was familiar with. Phishing emails. For those who aren’t familiar, it’s basically a scam email claiming that you’ve won money in a competition or some other kind of scenario but in reality, they have some kind of malicious intent. What we were going to do was a bit different than the generic “You’ve won £5000!”, we were going to do a targeted phishing email with our client from Elgin as the target.

The Benefits of Office 365

This article is all about Microsoft Office 365 and why more and more businesses are paying for it’s services/apps and why I think it’s beneficial. I’ll give examples on why, based on my experience using it and knowledge of it. I’m currently with The Apprentice Store where I’m doing work experience and getting a feel for some things in IT and all it has it offer. After being involved and observing the process of migrating a business to Office 365 I’m fully convinced and now hopefully I can make people reading this more convinced on the service.

Office 365, Cyber Essentials, Modern Apprenticeship work and even some ethical hacking. It’s been a busy week. I’ll start with Office 365.

As expected some small problems did arise after the migration, for example, some emails were getting let through our client’s spam filter. The Apprentice Store currently aims to not only support but to educate people so our solution to this was to create user guides so that’s what I did. I also made a user guide covering how to use the Excel spreadsheets I mentioned in the last blog post. I do think they help me a lot, you have to know a subject well to teach it. Later on, I did a bit of Windows PowerShell, I seem to be using it more and more so I plan to invest some time learning it in the future.